Many thousands of Ukrainian men have fled the country to evade the draft. It’s unusual to see young men travelling the other direction, from Poland into Ukraine. I vaguely assumed that the tall young man in my bus had taken advantage of the law passed last August. It allows men aged 18 to 22 to travel abroad despite martial law, on condition they first complete military registration.
In the queue at the Ukrainian border, I was surprised to see him hand a US passport to the immigration officer. Shelby had sparse facial hair, like an adolescent. We struck up a conversation. Aged 21, he was older than he looked, from the American deep south. He had just left the US marine corps and was joining the Ukrainian army.
Shelby is his call sign, not his real name. He was happy to talk but didn’t want to violate “op sec” – operational security. I agreed not to show his face in photographs or reveal personal details that might enable the Russians to identify him and his family.
“The Russians have a Telegram channel called TrackAMerc that combs the press and social media for information about foreign fighters in Ukraine,” Shelby explained. “If they identify you, they call up your wife and tell her you’re dead.”
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Shelby celebrated the second anniversary of his marriage to Little Redhead on April 5th. They’d been friends in high school but got serious when he left for Ukraine the first time, three days after graduation in May 2024. Shelby did humanitarian work for three months, running military supplies from Kharkiv to the front line north of Bakhmut.
Little Redhead works in an automotive factory. She pleaded with Shelby not to return to Ukraine. He promised not to stay more than one year. “She thinks all the hurt is on her side. I’m feeling it too. I want to get back but I want to be the man I want to be to her and our family. This is something I have to do or this is going to cloud everything else,” he says.
During his first stay, he was billeted with men from Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s Foreign Legion, which officially disbanded and integrated its members into other Ukrainian army units on December 31st, 2025.
Some of Shelby’s buddies from his 2024 stay in Ukraine were seriously wounded later. A former marine called Tex was ambushed by a Russian PK machine gun firing 7.62mm rounds. “He was hit five times. Three bullets hit his plate carrier (flak jacket) and cracked it in half. Two hit in the shoulder area. One missed his spine by half an inch. He took out a grenade and threw it at the machine gun position. This guy is a frickin’ super hero.”
Shelby had signed up for the US marine corps delayed-entry programme while in high school. When he previously came to Ukraine, he was already scheduled for boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina.
“I did it all back-to-back: high-school graduation; Ukraine; boot camp,” Shelby recalls. “I knew I wanted to be a marine in high school, because the marines are the best. This sounds awful, but there are a lot of fat guys in the army. If I’m going to be in combat, I want to be surrounded by guys who are competent.”
Shelby spent nearly two years in the marine corps but was given an honourable discharge after multiple surgeries for a hand injury he sustained when throwing a grenade.
He searched online for a Ukrainian unit to join and says he’s “really honoured” to have been accepted by the 12th Brigade Azov of the national guard. They are, he says, similar to the marines.
When I met Shelby, he was on his way to drone school in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk. He wants to fly the FPV (First Person View) kamikaze drones which are claiming the highest number of casualties in the Russian army. He had “hooked up with drone people” during his previous stay in Ukraine and continued to fly drones as a hobby in the marines.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US fought counterinsurgencies, Shelby said. “This is two modern-day armies. When the Ukrainians took back all that land in 2022, they were serious underdogs. They’ve held back the Russians, who everyone else is afraid of.”
Shelby sees the war as a contest between good and evil. He is angered by the fact that the US did not honour its commitment to defend Ukraine under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. He was also angered by the way US president Donald Trump treated Zelenskiy in the Oval Office.
During his previous stay, Shelby visited a school the Russians had burned down in Donbas. “They mined the playground. You can’t get worse than that.”
He was only 19 then. “Now I’m getting older and am able to do something about it and have the experience to do something about it. It’s not something I can turn a cheek to. God gave me an able body and an able spirit to come out here and help physically and that’s not something I’m going to waste.”
